Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps users maintain application availability and allows users to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to definable conditions.
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Microsoft System Center
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Microsoft System Center Suite is a family of IT management software for network monitoring, updating and patching, endpoint protection with anti-malware, data protection and backup, ITIL- structured IT service management, remote administration and more.
It is available in two editions: standard and datacenter. Datacenter provides unlimited virtualization for high density private clouds, while standard is for lightly or non-virtualized private cloud workloads.
If you need to establish a system right away, in the past it took weeks or months to request a quote from the vendor and receive the equipment. Now, with Amazon EC2 in less than tens of minutes or hours, you can create a test environment and test it without any inconvenience.
For companies with more than 10 Windows devices and needing to standardize the OS, AV, access, share resources, and install software. SCCM is the way to go. This software is unnecessary if the business is all remote users and not in an office-type setting. There are cloud offerings or none to accomplish what a business needs.
Needs web based storefront for requesting new software
Needs ability to manage the packaging work flow better
Sometimes is slow to download and there is no indication the entire catalog is being loaded, resulting in confused users not being able to find common software in the available list.
Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.
It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.
The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems. Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.
If I had to dislike something about the system it would be how much it changes once you upgrade. This could be more of a problem of mine since I get used to one way and don't like it when it changes so much. I am enjoying the newest update, but it is a mess when you are actually going through the upgrades.
The main reason is our total infra is created on AWS and we tend to use the natural service by AWS rather than third party tools, which has more advantages when the auto scaling interacts with other AWS services and its way easy to configure when we compare it with counter parts like Autoscale from Microsoft Azure.
We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows Updates, causing IT to have to constantly touch machines after they were imaged and update or manage them with a much more hands on approach.
We will devote more time to development than server administration, but we will require additional time if you migrate from another ecosystem.
Fault detection and reporting are automated in the old server, and bandwidth is fixed per month, but everything is manageable automatically. We only pay for the resources we use.
After some months, we met our return on investment (ROI).
We have been able to automate our patch management, firmware and other security concerns.
We have a standardized "image" ensuring our setup is consistent across the enterprise. This alone has saved us in time to support and time to understand how to use our desktops.
